Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for customer contact assignment in a task routing system such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system, or other similar system and more particularly to providing a co-browsing preview of a queued contact before and during handling of the contact.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide support for customers of a product or service by allowing those users to make requests for service that can include a question posed by the user related to the product or service. For example, a user may log onto or access a CRM system provided by a manufacturer of cellphones and request information related to use of that device and that may include a question such as “How do I adjust the brightness of the display?” Generally speaking, these systems receive requests for service, e.g., in the form of a phone call, web page form, instant message, email, etc., and route the requests to a human agent for addressing the request and providing an answer to the question. In ideal cases, the agent is selected based on the topic of the question or request and a predefined profile of that agent that includes indications of the agent's skills and/or expertise. This skills-based route can be done by an Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system that is either part of or separate from the CRM system.
Once an agent is selected, the routing can be accomplished by placing the customer contact into a queue for the selected agent. Typically, the agent is provided a graphical and/or textual representation of this queue. Thus, the agent can see the number of contacts waiting to be handled and may even be able to see some identifying information about the contact such as a name, phone number, customer ID number, ticket number, etc. However, little other information about the customer or the reason for the contact is available to the agent while the contact is in the agent's queue. Rather, the agent typically needs to initiate a session, e.g., a chat session, voice call, Instant Messaging (IM) session, with the customer to collect more information about the reason for the contact. Then, if the agent finds that the contact was not optimally routed for some reason, the agent may need to transfer the customer to another channel, e.g., from a chat session to a voice call, or even to another agent. In such cases, customer experience or satisfaction may suffer. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for customer contact assignment in a task routing system.